Stalin's Genocides (14 page)

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Tukhachevskii should be forced to tell everything and to reveal his contacts. It is impossible that he acted on his own.” Stalin was daily informed by Yezhov of the progress of the interrogation, which during the Khrushchev years was revealed to have been quite bloody. On June 11, 1937, Tukhachevskii and seven of the leading army generals were condemned to death by a military tribunal for treason and spying. Soon thereafter nearly a thousand additional high-ranking military officers and political commissars were arrested and purged.26 Torture did its job, as Stalin knew it would.

The extreme contrast between the utopianism of

Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism as practiced in the 1930s, an ideology that promised the victory of socialism, the creation of a new Soviet man and woman, and the perfection of life itself, and the realities of deprivation, famine, cramped living quarters, and poorly compensated labor created the systemic need for purges and violence.

Some historians have also pointed out the problematic relationship between the center and the periphery as a source for the purges. More tenable than this assertion, now pretty much disproven, that the purges originated in the regions, is the argument that Stalin wanted to shake up local state and party satraps, killing some, exiling others, while promoting a new generation of more pliant cadres.27

Whether in the provinces or in the capital, the purges fit Stalin’s need for unassailable power. For Stalin, there were too many Old Bolsheviks around, veterans of the revolution, who felt entitled to their positions and privileges and the great terror 117

thus might challenge his leadership or at least stall his policies. And not just Stalin was interested in expanding his power and getting even with his enemies. The purges un-leashed a torrent of denunciations, as middle- and lower-level party and state officials settled scores by informing on their rivals and opponents. Careerism promoted some of this reporting; some was meant defensively—if I don’t report first on Comrade Ivanov, he will report on me. But, in the end, the NKVD had more than enough information to spread its net of arrests and investigations even without torture and repeated interrogations.

Stalin and the NKVD encouraged denunciations, arrests, and trials at all levels of society. Everyone was to have a stake in identifying and eliminating supposed enemies. The population would be mobilized in this manner and taught to engage in a system that left no citizen out of the drama of creating a new Soviet society. On behalf of the Central Committee, Stalin wrote to the local party chiefs (August 3, 1937): “Considering completely necessary the political mobilization of kolkhozniks around the work carried on to destroy the enemies of the people in agriculture . . . , [the Central Committee] orders you to organize in every region by locality open show trials against enemies of the people, wreckers in agriculture . . . widely publicizing the course of the trials in the local press.”28 In particular, Stalin was anxious to have the kolkhoz farmers aroused against those local officials who supposedly undermined the success of Soviet agriculture. The same would apply to factory workers, who should know about the wrecking activities of their supervisors.

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There was method to Stalin’s madness: the attack of the NKVD on the Soviet population was not completely random. Biography and genealogy mattered and mattered a lot, as the work of Oleg Khlevniuk, the premier Russian historian of the purges, has demonstrated.29 Old Bolsheviks and their allies, families, contacts, and friends fell to the sword of the NKVD and Stalin, as did the leading military officers of the Red Army, especially those who had participated in the Civil War and had an independent sense of self as worthy founders of Soviet power. Clearly, Stalin worried about the threat of “Bonapartism” in the ranks of the Red Army, though again, there is little evidence that these fears were in any way founded in reality. Former Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Kadets, among other non-Bolshevik political formations, also did not stand much of a chance of escaping arrest and its horrific consequences. These and other potential political opponents—and the people associated with them in any way—constituted an important target of the purge machinery.

Equally important (and more numerous) were those targeted because of their social background: kulaks, priests, ex-landowners, ex-tsarist officials, “asocials,” and so on. In addition to the terrible fate of the kulaks, the devastating attack on Russian priests, nuns, and monks in the 1930s, which saw tens of thousands executed and sent into exile, might also be considered a genocidal action. As we saw earlier, national as well as social background mattered, as especially Poles and Germans, but also French, English, Greeks, Finns, and others, were rounded up by the great terror 119

the NKVD and exiled or executed. According to data on the Great Terror, in fact, the largest single group of

“repressed” consisted of nationalities with “homelands”

abroad and foreigners.

But we could go too far in seeing the purges as a rational, if exaggerated, response to potential opposition.

Many in the categories above escaped being purged. In fact, some scholars of the period have noted that it was precisely from these targeted groups that Stalin recruited some of his closest confederates; their very vulnerability was a tested way to ensure their loyalty. Even more important to understanding the arbitrariness of the terror is the fact that no one was safe from arrest; hundreds of thousands of ordinary Soviet citizens, in the party and out, with “clean” social, political, and national biographies, ended up under arrest, executed, or in exile. When Beria effectively replaced Yezhov in November 1938, and proceeded to execute him and his lieutenants in the NKVD

for excesses in the carrying out of the purges, it was precisely the innocence of so many of the arrested and the

“illegal methods” that were used to extract confessions, to which the documents averred. Beria’s record, of course, proved to be little better than Yezhov’s.

David Shearer makes the important point that the purges did little to improve the performance or efficiency of Soviet institutions. On the contrary, the judiciary, police, and military organizations were in shambles as a result. The purging of industrial elites increased the incidence of factory accidents and production snafus. The railway system was left in chaos as a result of the top to 120

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bottom purge of the railway administration and railway workers.30 The party was also decapitated of its leadership, the vast majority of whom had been Bolsheviks before 1921. Of the 139 members and candidate members of the Central Committee of the party at the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934, 98, or about 70 percent, were arrested and executed in 1937–38.31

The dangers to Soviet security from beyond the USSR’s borders and the increasingly tense international situation, to a large extent caused by Hitler’s successful bullying of the European powers, are said to have been the primary motivation for the terror and purges. As Oleg Khlevniuk writes: “The NKVD orders guiding the mass operations in 1937–38 show that the Great Terror was a centrally organized punitive action, planned in Moscow, against a potential fifth column perceived as capable of stabbing the country in the back in case of war.”32 But the arrests and mass killing during the purges were driven less by the real threats to Soviet security than by Stalin’s xenophobia and paranoia. Without Stalin, the genocidaire, it is hard to imagine the Great Terror.

7 The Crimes of Stalin

and Hitler

In the introduction to his book
The Harvest of Sorrow
, which examines the history of collectivization and the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33, Robert Conquest compares the crimes of Stalinism with those of Nazism: “Fifty years ago, as I write these words, the Ukraine and the Ukrainian, Cossack, and other areas to the east—a stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants—was like one vast Belsen. A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbours. At the same time (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”1

In the
Black Book of Communism
, Stephane Courtois even more directly makes this connection: “the genocide of a ‘class’ may well be tantamount to the genocide of a ‘race’.” The death of a Ukrainian kulak child whom the Stalinist regime purposely sacrificed in the famine

“is equal to” the death of a Jewish child in the Warsaw 122

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Ghetto, who died as a result of Nazi-instigated starvation.2

Here, Conquest would disagree. He believes (meaning he has “the primary feeling”) that the Holocaust was essentially “worse” than Stalin’s crimes.3

Victims of communism—whether Latvian deportees

to the Gulag or Russian political prisoners in Kolyma in eastern Siberia, relatives of Polish officers shot at Katyn, or of Chechen schoolteachers who perished in Kazakh exile—have a hard time understanding the special character of the crimes of Hitler. The Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis (whose father was a Hungarian Jew) writes: “Should anyone tell you Kolyma was different from Auschwitz, tell him to go to hell.”4

Yet from a historical perspective, which is not necessarily the same as that of the victim or the perpetrator, it seems evident, as stated above, that the Holocaust is the most extreme case of genocide in human history. This comes from the apocalyptic nature of the Nazi racial utopia, the complete helplessness of the Jews in face of the attack on their very existence as a people, the sheer extent of the killing, and the industrial nightmare of the gas chambers and ovens of the elimination camps. As Richard Evans writes,

“There was no Soviet Treblinka, built to murder people on their arrival.”5 Therefore, Courtois’s comparison between the death of a child by starvation in the Warsaw Ghetto and that of a child caught up in the Ukrainian famine is a false one when comparing the larger dimensions of the Holocaust to Soviet mass killing. The legitimate comparison is between the fate of the child in Auschwitz or Treblinka and that of a child in famine-stricken Ukraine the crimes of stalin and hitler 123

or in the Gulag. The Ukrainian child in the Soviet countryside or the child in the Gulag had a chance to survive; the Jewish child in the death camps was condemned to death, even if there were scattered exceptions.

The basic revulsion at the Holocaust remains with us today and legitimately shapes our understanding of a variety of important political and moral issues. Precisely because the Soviet Union was largely responsible for winning the war against the Nazis and lost twenty-seven million lives in defeating the evil that brought the world Auschwitz and Babi Yar, there is considerable and understandable reticence to consider Soviet crimes in the same category as Nazi ones. But the Holocaust was neither the only case of genocide in recent history nor so singular that it cannot be compared with other egregious episodes of mass killing, like the Armenian, Rwandan, or Cambodian genocides. Genocide is the “crime of crimes” in international law, but there are “worse” historical cases of genocide and less horrendous ones.6

This brings us back to the question of whether Stalin’s murderous attacks on peoples, groups, classes, political opponents, and his population as a whole qualify as genocide, “the crime of crimes.” Some scholars prefer to side-step the question by coining new terms—like “classicide,”

“democide,” or “politicide”—that preserve the ethnic-, national-, and religious- based exclusivity of genocide, while making it clear that Stalin’s crimes as a whole constituted mass murder.7 Others will focus on Stalin’s murderous deportations of the “punished peoples” during the war as that part of his repertoire of mass killing that can 124

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be classified as genocide.8 Still others look at the NKVD’s executions of twenty-two thousand interned Polish army officers and government officials in 1940, the Katyn forest massacre, as the best case against the Stalinist regime for genocide.9

Some scholars would prefer not to use the term of genocide at all in historical studies of mass killing, argu-ing that it is too closely linked to international judicial norms and thus to proclamations of guilty or innocent.

The historians’ task, they maintain, is to liberate their narratives about mass killing from legal language. Others decide not to use the term because of the proliferation of the claims to genocide by a variety of peoples and groups that seek to strengthen the legitimacy of their historical sufferings, thus debasing and invalidating genocide’s original meaning. There are also scholars who object that the term has become excessively politicized, used to condemn some states and political systems, while justifying military intervention.10 These objections all have some merit; it is too easy to misuse the term genocide for a variety of purposes that have nothing to do with scholarship. But it also does not make sense for historians to sequester themselves from the international conversation about genocide, whether about the past or about the present. History and international judicial norms are inextricably intertwined.

The principled abstention from using the term genocide can serve politicized purposes as much as its application to specific historical circumstances.

Much of the tiptoeing around the problem of genocide when dealing with the litany of Stalinist mass crimes re-the crimes of stalin and hitler 125

lates to the language of the keystone of genocide legislation: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on December 9, 1948. Here genocide is famously defined as a variety of “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” This powerful idea of genocide took hold especially in the 1980s and 1990s in the international courts regarding crimes in former Yugoslavia (primarily of Serbs against Bosnian Muslims) and in Rwanda (Hutu against Tutsi). The growing body of scholarship in “genocide studies” has also been deeply influenced by the force of the convention and by the extraordinary impact of “Holocaust studies,” which argue in their most radical formulations that the Holocaust was a uniquely horrible event in the history of mass killing and that, at the very least, the mass murder of ethnic groups or nations should be at the core of genocide. But perhaps it is time to stop asking the question whether the group that is being murdered “in whole or in part” is a national, ethnic, and religious group, or whether it is a social, political, or economic group. What is, after all, the difference when it comes to human life?